In recent months, Americans have engaged in a widespread debate about how much government surveillance is justified—and constitutional—to protect the country from national security threats. Today, in a column for The Guardian, I argue that there is a growing culture of surveillance in America—and it isn’t limited to just one government institution based out of Maryland. To the contrary, at thousands of campuses across the country, college administrators engage in similar monitoring practices. But often it’s not anyone’s safety that appears to be at stake—instead, it’s administrators’ and universities’ reputations, and they’re willing to cloak their monitoring in security language to justify their snooping.